Social CRM A No-Brainer

There remains a common tendency to say 'social' and think 'marketing' but the social revolution of the past decade is broader than this narrow confine.

As the infographic below demonstrates the social customer of today is looking to 'participate' all four areas of Marketing, Sales, Feedback and Service & Support.

It would be fair to say that the adoption of marketing through social media is now mainstream and monitoring the 'buzz' is a growing realisation for SME's.  The deficient segment of the mix is often direct interaction with the customer, or prospect, with lack time and staff resources being the common excuses.

Fully incorporating social CRM into a business is a bit of a 'no-brainer' when one considers the benefits:

• Major cost saving in the marketing budget
• Greater opportunities to hook prospects
• Growing sales volumes through social channels
• The power of word-of-mouth recommendations to drive sales

Hubspot reports that 71% more likely to purchase based on social media referrals. It is the power of conversation driven social CRM that all businesses should strive to harness if they hope build their customer base and increase sales.

Social CRM should augment not supplant current business practices and needs to be meshed with other business strategies to be truly effective.

Related articles

• Gartner: Half of enterprises are wasting money on social media (infoworld.com)
• ISM Introduces Social CRM Practice (prweb.com)
• The Business Value of Social CRM and Common Use Cases

Not Wanted On Digital Voyage?

Is the company web site a digital appendage that is fast becoming obsolete?

If you listen to the pronouncements of Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook's U.K. operation you would have to thing so.

Putting aside the vested interest, he certainly has a point that for many companies social media is becoming more important in engaging with their customers than the traditional, 20th century web site.

It is delusional to believe that building a web site will guarantee an audience and that this audience will be prepared to make repeat visits to get to news and offers.

In this day and age customers and site visitors expect incentives and they expect these inducements to come to them, rather than the other way around.

According to Haines statistical analysis of Facebook likes on  company FB sites are well ahead of those people who visited that company's Web site.

For Starbucks the ratio was 21.1 million likes to 1.8 million site visitors. For Coca-Cola, it's 20.5 million compared with 270,000; for Oreo, 10.1 million compared with 290,000; and for Dr. Pepper, it's 4.1 million compared with 325,000.

Haines summarised some of the functional advantages of Facebook for marketers:

• Ways to offer free samples to customers
• The ability to attract the attention of smartphone users making local check-ins.
• The ability to build e-commerce sites into Facebook pages.
• "Reach block" ads that change as many as five times in a 24-hour period to send a sequence of ad messages to Facebook users.
• Surveys that let companies try to engage customers in company decisions.
• Applications built atop Facebook's interface that let companies create custom-made interactive programs

Despite this companies would be very unwise to abandon their web sites and rely solely on Facebook.  The problem being that Facebook is a 'walled society' unlike the Web, which is open.

You limit your options for customer search and discovery of your online brand if you rely totally on social media.

Related articles

• Facebook Offers Commenting Plug-In To Other Sites (informationweek.com)
• Will Facebook replace company Web sites? (news.cnet.com)

Welcome To The Twitterverse

View a larger version

According to Quantcast, Twitter.com saw a leap in US traffic from under 30 million users a month to nearly 80 million from September 2009 to December 2010, a growth which has changed the landscape of Twitter applications in many ways.



There is a huge galaxy of applications and services orbiting the Twitter core. So numerous are they that it is difficult to wade through the plethora of widgets, apps and services that do almost anything you desire.

The infographic is a single visualisation  designed to inform brands, individuals and organizations about the thousands of Twitter applications available today.

It highlights applications in 19 different rings ranging from branding and geolocation to Twitter search and marketing.

Ring 2: Geographics
Ring 3: Interest Graph
Ring 4: Dashboard
Ring 5: Event Management
Ring 6: Live Streaming
Ring 7: Geo Location
Ring 8: Relationships
Ring 9: Marketing and Advertising
Ring 10: Rich Media Ring 11: Communication Management
Ring 12: Research and Analysis Ring 13: Stream Management
Ring 14: Mobile Applications Ring 15: Trends Ring 16: Social CRM
Ring 17: Influence and Resonance
Ring 18: Twitter Search
Ring 19: Causation

Download a high resolution version of the Twitterverse infographic here.

Paul Fabretti points out that this graphic shows just how important these peripheral services have become to the core application.

"Understanding how effective API’s can be is to understand why Twitter has grown so significantly – give people (developers in this case) the freedom to use you/your service to create things of value for them is a sometimes invaluable thing to do."

And if you haven't already done so, visit oneforty for social media tools that may be of use to you and your business.

Related articles

• Exploring the Twitterverse (briansolis.com)